On Monday, Microsoft made headlines by plunking down $26 billion for LinkedIn . Now it’s announcing its second acquisition of the week: For an undisclosed sum, the company has bought Wand Labs, a Silicon Valley-based startup that declares its mission is “to tear down app walls, integrate your services in chat, and make them work together so you can do more with less taps.”

Founded in 2013, Wand is tiny–it has just seven employees–and, though no longer in stealth mode, is hardly a household name. The iOS and Android apps it built haven’t yet reached general availability, and now they never will, as their creators put them aside and contribute to the greater Microsoftian effort.

But for all the ways that this acquisition is different than the mammoth LinkedIn deal, both transactions are pieces of the same puzzle. Microsoft is assembling a future for itself that involves big data, bots, connective tissue between an array of apps and services, and other concepts and technologies far afield from its legacy as a provider of packaged software. And it thinks that both LinkedIn and Wand can help it get there.

Vishal Sharma Photo: courtesy of Wand

Wand’s apps, which used a messaging interface to let you perform a variety of collaborative tasks–from sharing songs to giving a friend the ability to control your Nest thermostat–“were demonstrators more than anything else,” says founder/CEO Vishal Sharma. All along, his company planned to work with big players to incorporate the types of capabilities it was building into products and services with sizable existing customer bases. Now the team that built the apps will continue their work inside one of the largest tech companies of them all.

Everything Wand has been up to fits in nicely with Microsoft’s current interest in conversation, which is part of an industry-wide trend to build bots, agents, assistants, and other tools that you can control by typing or talking. As Steven Levy explained last year in an excellent Backchannel feature, Sharma has been working on the ideas behind Wand for years. Before starting the company, he spent years at Google, where he was moved to create a voice-powered assistant called Jacob after an accident left his uncle blind.

“One thing led to another, and that got subsumed into a larger effort called Google Now,” he explains.

Vishal Sharma (center) and colleagues at work at Wand Photo: courtesy of Wand

Once he left Google and founded Wand, Sharma got going on the conversational approach to software interfaces that became major fodder for developer conferences such as Microsoft’s Build and Facebook’s F8 in 2016. “We’ve been ahead of the curve,” he says. “We were talking about actionable messaging a year and a half, two years ago, and pushing the envelope.”